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Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies
Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies
Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies
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Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies

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Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the Falls aren't very natural anymore. In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized and landscape redesigned, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery -- waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblem of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. Archetype of natural beauty, they belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will.

Combining history, reportage and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the Falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the Bomb and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara.

From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us rethink our place in it today.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 6, 2008
ISBN9781416564812
Author

Ginger Strand

Ginger Strand was raised in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Her fiction and essays have appeared in many places, including The Believer, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has been awarded fiction residencies by Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in New York City.

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Rating: 3.3529412058823533 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was an enjoyable "of local interest" book, looking at Niagara Falls through American history, from the transition of control of area from the Tuscarora tribe to the new settlers in the region, the creation of the whole concept of the honeymoon in America, hydro-electric power, Love Canal and other chemical and nuclear waste, and most recently, the introduction of casinos on both the Canadian and American sides. It's a very chatty book, and I enjoyed the tone -- this is someone who clearly likes history and trivia and weird asides but will also come out and offer her fairly educated opinion about some of the goings-on she discovers in her research, both historical and in the present day. As someone who is native to the region, I loved coming across bits in this book that had some elements that were known to me, often through family stories or more folksy sources, and other aspects that were completely new information. There's this on-going theme, that comes up in the title, that there's been this contradiction about what is really going on with the Falls and how it is presented in order to promote whatever it is people were/are trying to market - everything from the creation of the park to how the power is generated. I get it, but I thought it might have been slightly improved with less repetition. I would recommend to people who like the conversational history approach, there's something similar to Sarah Vowell, although not nearly so over the top. I was saying recently that something that annoys ... well, annoys is a strong word, so maybe not that strong but anyway, Sarah Vowell is often making these self-depreciating comments in her books about how her various socio-historical obsessions make people think she is odd and so they'll avoid her at parties and things, but that always seems a little disingenuous to me, she's famous and her friends are well-known quirky writers and other celebrities so I honestly doubt too many people are avoiding her at parties, in fact I bet people try to get her going so they can enjoy whatever engaging thing she comes out with. With this author, on the other hand, when she describes the awkwardness of her social interactions involving things like her love of hydro-infrastructure, I believe her and empathize with her.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This was an enjoyable "of local interest" book, looking at Niagara Falls through American history, from the transition of control of area from the Tuscarora tribe to the new settlers in the region, the creation of the whole concept

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Inventing Niagara - Ginger Strand

Introduction

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

I WENT TO NIAGARA because I wanted to laugh at it. I was a college student, and I considered the Falls no more than a kitschy spectacle, a chance to soak in a heart-shaped Jacuzzi and get some really awful souvenirs for my irony-adoring pals. My college boyfriend and I pulled into the parking lot of the tackiest motel we could find and prepared our world-weary smirks. We had quarters for the vibrating bed, a cheap camera to document our glee. And then we got out of the car. To this day, I remember the stationary blast of sound that filled the air, even though the Falls were nowhere in sight. In spite of myself, I was impressed.

Years later, I went back. I had moved from the Midwest to the East Coast, moved on from the college boyfriend and cycled through a series of jobs—proofreader, box-office manager, teacher, copywriter—to see which might leave me time to finish the novel that was slinking around in my head. I found myself with two weeks open in my calendar, and I suggested to my boyfriend, Bob, that we rent a car and take a road trip around New York looking at hydroinfrastructure.

I love hydroinfrastructure—water tunnels, reservoirs, canals, sewers, aqueducts—I find all of it inspiring, a testament to humanity’s ability to come together in the interest of higher ideals like cold drinks and hot showers. Luckily, Bob doesn’t mind indulging my arcane obsessions—he’s a bit of a hydrogeek himself, so off we went, using a road map to pinpoint hydro hotspots. We started off in the Catskills, visiting New York City’s water supply. Then we drove north to the Erie Canal—still, I am happy to report, open for business, though it’s largely tourist cruises and pleasure boats today. Following the Erie Canal, we wound up, as did its earliest passengers, at Niagara Falls. And there we visited the Adam Beck Power Plant, on the Canadian side. The Beck plant offers a tour. They take you inside through a tunnel that smells of ozone and let you look through glass windows at giant, whirring generators while the guide unfurls the mysteries of turbines and transformers for the rapt crowd. It was on this tour that I first heard about the waterfall’s hours of operation—it gets turned up during the days in summer for the tourists, and turned down at night so it can generate more power. Go at 7 A.M., the guide suggested, and watch the water being dialed up. In other words, Niagara Falls, if not turned off and on like a faucet, is turned up and down like a fancy massaging showerhead. I was taking notes—I always take notes on vacation; otherwise, how do you remember stuff?—but at that point I stopped scribbling and just grinned like a maniacal toddler.

Every American feels something for Niagara Falls, but from that point on, I was obsessed. I began to visit Niagara whenever I had an opportunity. I stayed in hotels on both sides, from Ontario’s shiny new Radisson to New York’s decrepit Travelodge. I got up on cold mornings to run along the riverfront and stayed up on warm nights to lose at blackjack. I interviewed local historians and park workers and engineers. I got the phone number of a Canadian Mountie. I traced the path of the explorer La Salle as he and his band of idiots toiled up the Niagara Escarpment and built the first European ship on the upper Great Lakes, guarding the work site at night because angry Indians were trying to burn the big canoe. I bought gas and cigarettes from Smokin Joes Trading Post on the Tuscarora Reservation. I don’t smoke, but they were a dollar a pack.

I hung around the public library bugging the librarians, until, exasperated, they left me locked in for the evening. I stayed in a trailer campground in Canada and tromped all over Brock’s Monument, searching for the cenotaph of the war hero’s horse. I was self-appointed inspector of wax museums, halls of fame, haunted houses, historical societies, scenic tunnels, and the Evel Knievel Museum and Pawn Shop, surveyor of aquariums, water parks and boat rides. And of course, I spent hours gazing at falling water, following the sheets of liquid that hold their shape and then disintegrate, the hypnotic contortions of the mist, the bubbling, gymnastic upper rapids and the frothy race of the lower, all of it creating a fuzzy, wraithlike picture, because Niagara, like Mount Everest or the Mississippi River, is one of those places with so many meanings layered onto it, it’s almost hard to see. The Greeks had a god named Proteus, who, if you grabbed him, started endlessly changing shape—a serpent, an eagle, a lion—in the hope you would startle and let go. That’s Niagara, always in motion, always transforming, and never just what it seems. A seal. A salmon. A buffalo. A two-headed calf, a two-legged dog. A baby with three ears.

Case in point: Niagara Falls. Three entities go by that name. Two are towns, one in New York State, one in Ontario. Niagara Falls, New York, is by general agreement a mess. The river above the Falls is lined with factories, many of them shuttered. Almost half the population and more than half the jobs have decamped since 1950, and it shows. Housing stock is crumbling, and the center city is a study in urban decay: empty lots, boarded-up businesses, foreclosure signs. The roads are potholed, the sidewalks cracked. Someone’s usually pushing a shopping cart down the street. The area around the Falls is a jumble of failed attempts at urban renewal—a bankrupt mall, a foreclosed Native American museum, a shoddy row of cheap attractions, handmade signs and pushcarts selling samosas and souvenir sweatshirts. If you can figure out which way the riverfront is, you’ll notice the view is blocked by a giant parking ramp and a smattering of hotels, not fancy ones, but the kind that try to temper their bland mediocrity with the word inn. Days Inn. Comfort Inn. Quality Inn.

The vast majority of American tourists, faced with this national embarrassment, head straight for the border. Things are different in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Along their riverfront, the Canadians have made parkland: a strip of violently landscaped formal gardens offering access to Canada’s classic panoramas and regularly spaced snack stands. Above the park, perched on a steep ridge, is an area about ten blocks square, packed solid with hotels, casinos, souvenir shops, observation towers and franchise restaurants. There, on Clifton Hill—Niagara’s street of FUN!—you’re hit with a loud, lurid onslaught of over forty attractions. You have the IMAX Theatre, the Guinness World Records Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, the Movieland Wax Museum, the Niagara SkyWheel, Dinosaur Park Mini Putt Golf and Ghostblasters, a haunted house merged with a laser tag game. The ghosts spook you and you shoot them.

The two Niagaras wink at one another across the gorge, the contrapuntal faces of globalism: on the Canadian side, the monotony of our worldwide monoculture, the proliferation of malls and brands and franchises proclaiming globalism’s intent to make every town look the same, from Benares to Boise. The soul-sapping boredom of it all is reflected in its urgent spawning of ever-more-extreme cheap thrills. Meanwhile, across the river in America, you see globalism’s economic underbelly: crumbling row houses, unemployment offices, and defunct factories parked on EPA-designated brownfields, the sediment of a century’s toxic runoff. Rising up from the desolation is the one shiny thing on the New York side’s skyline, the new Seneca Niagara Casino, a hopeful mirage where grannies, suburbanites and cash-strapped locals—two-thirds of whom subsist on public assistance—unload lives of quiet desperation, quarter by quarter, into the slots.

Poised between these two worlds, oblivious, inexorable, is the third Niagara Falls: the waterfall. Hundreds of millions of gallons plunge every minute over a 176-foot ledge, as Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron and Erie—one-fifth of the world’s freshwater—drain into Lake Ontario and out to sea. It roars, day in, day out, untouchable and untouched by the incursions around it. Nothing—not the tacky plastic fun park of Canada’s family heaven nor the hard-at-the-heels squalor of New York’s economic hell—can ruin one of the world’s prime natural wonders. Or so we’re told.

Guidebooks today are quick to deride Niagaras one and two, but they are unanimous in declaring the waterfall splendid. Nearly everyone who sees Niagara Falls is struck by the wonder of it, proclaims Fodor’s. The authors describe the tawdry surroundings, but assure the reader that the astounding beauty of the Falls remains undiminished, and unending. Undiminished indeed: the waterfall is diminished by anywhere from one-half to three-quarters, depending on the season and time of day. Some guidebooks admit this, but they tell you not to worry. The Lonely Planet guide cites the stats on diversion, but assures us the falls themselves are amazing. Nature, it seems, can’t be harmed by a few miles of kitsch, or the diversion of a little water.

This situation is not new. A hundred and fifty years ago, guidebooks also assured visitors that the tacky tourist carnival flanking the Falls did not impinge on their glory. The great wonder, it’s true, was surrounded by Chinese pagodas, dancing pavilions, camera obscuras, Indian bazaars, and sideshows featuring counting pigs and a man named Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy. This carnival, every guidebook assured you, would ruin your experience of the Falls. But if you ignored it, if you went instead to the correct places and gave yourself up to the contemplation of canonized vistas, your experience of Niagara would be sublime. Writers, artists and intellectuals joined guidebook authors in directing visitors’ steps and sentiments away from the tacky and toward the transcendent. Ever since its debut as America’s tourist icon, Niagara has built a reputation that depends on separating its natural wonder from the artificial accretions around it.

But here’s what I learned at Niagara: the distinction is false. Niagara Falls as a natural wonder does not exist anymore. Manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificially lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule, the Falls are more a monument to man’s meddling than to nature’s strength. In fact, they are a study in self-delusion: we visit them to encounter something real, then observe them through fake Indian tales, audio tours and IMAX films. We consider them a symbol of American manifest destiny, yet we share them politely with Canada. We hold them up as an example of unconquerable nature even as we applaud the daredevils and power-brokers who conquer them. And we congratulate ourselves for preserving nature’s beauty in an ecosystem that, beneath its shimmering emerald surface, reflects our own ugly ability to destroy. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature, reshaping its contours, redirecting its force, claiming to submit to its will while imposing our own upon it.

My purpose in going to Niagara was to think about nature, and I ended up obsessed with human things. The suicide hotline phones dotting the rapids. The senior housing complex with views of Love Canal. The diner across from the public library called The Why. The wax museum with a room dedicated to the three women who embody the ideal feminine: Mother Teresa, Princess Di and Julia Roberts. The Cave of the Winds—not a cave, but a tunnel blasted out of the rock and a boardwalk taking you into the waterfall’s spray. The giant power tunnel intakes, gleaming like outsized radiators, guarding the underwater voids where two scuba divers were sucked to the grating by water entering the tunnels and held there until they drowned.

And the landfills. Niagara’s landfills are spectacular: mountains of made land, rising out of the earth, gently breathing their methane, almost beautiful in their grassy silence. One of them is so large it looms in the distance from the highway exit, and as you drive from Wal-Mart to the outlet mall, the landfill hulks along in the background, a constant companion. The people of Niagara Falls must unconsciously look for it, the way the Swiss glance up at the Matterhorn, or the citizens of Portland, Oregon, locate Mount Hood: Where’s the mountain? There it is. I’m home.

There’s a standard set of stories about Niagara, recounted in tourist guidebooks and scholarly tomes, and trotted out every few years in an educational documentary that begins and ends with sweeping helicopter shots of falling water. Meanwhile, much of the real story of America’s best-known landscape goes untold, and as I began to trace it, I often felt like I was entering Bizzaro World. From a French fur trader with an iron hand to the Army Corps of Engineers reshaping the riverbed, Indian casinos built on brownfields to 280,000 radioactive mice buried at the Falls, many of Niagara’s stories are like the drums secreted in its landfills: shoved out of sight, covered over to look presentable, and driven by with glazed eyes, a quick flick of the radio volume. Oh that—just drive around it. Once, when I was asking too many unanswerable questions in the Local History section of the Niagara Falls Public Library, librarian Maureen Fennie held up a hand to stop me. They’ve put it all down the memory hole, she told me, and they’re not letting it out.

This book documents an obsession. An obsession with the things Niagara has been made to mean throughout the relatively short time it has lived with people—nature, America, power, beauty, death. An obsession with the ways in which the history of Niagara Falls is a history of falsification, prevarication and omission. An obsession with going down the memory hole and retrieving what’s buried there.

Why did I become obsessed with Niagara Falls? People ask me that all the time. Niagara has a lot to tell us about nature, but while I care deeply about the environment, I have never been what you call a nature-lover. I never know what kind of tree or bird I’m looking at, woods and their denizens make me nervous, and I don’t like being cold, damp, tired or too far from a person with a cocktail shaker. Given a choice between an exhibit of German Expressionist paintings and a hike up some soul-stirring hill, I’ll take the thick brush strokes and green faces every time. My college boyfriend—the same one who took me to Niagara—once refused to speak to me for a full day because I declined to hike in the Rockies with him and instead read a Russian novel in the car. There are things you can’t read in books, he fumed, and I remember really meaning it when I said, Like what?

But I learned a lot at Niagara, about the natural world and about that human-made idea, nature. My interest was piqued at first, I think, because I grew up in Michigan, another once-storied, now-shabby corner of the Rust Belt where nature was both monarch and slave. Since 1999, I have lived in Lower Manhattan, and that resonates with Niagara too; often as I walk from my home to the nearest bookstore in search of some account of canal building or the fur trade, I pass the carnivalesque strip of souvenir stands, camera-toting tourists and information booths along the edge of what they now call Ground Zero and I think about how meaning gets layered onto a place.

Mostly I became obsessed with Niagara because I am an American, and although it sits mainly in Canada, Niagara Falls has a lot to tell us about America. Its story is a primer of American history—Indian treaties, conflicts with Britain, the Civil War, the industrial age, the ad age, two world wars, one cold war, environmentalism, globalism. For many years, Niagara was nature, and America was nature’s nation. And then the Falls came to stand for power, just as America began discovering its own. It was industry during the rise of industrial America and capital of kitsch when American culture doubled over on itself and turned pop quotation into art. It was America to the European, freedom to the enslaved, opportunity to the impoverished and downfall to the ambitious and proud. Niagara is constantly reinvented, and if nations can be said to have national talents, America’s is self-invention. It’s what makes people like W. E. B. Du Bois and Marilyn Monroe—two Niagara fans—possible, and it’s also what gave us slavery, the Bomb and Love Canal—all things that unfolded, in part, at the Falls. It’s all too easy, history reminds us, for self-invention to slip into self-delusion. Put on an act for long enough and it’s hard to remember what’s real.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. When General Leslie Groves, manager of the Manhattan Project, witnessed the explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, he thought of Blondin crossing the Falls on a tightrope. Why did he think of America’s most famous natural wonder as he experienced humanity’s violent mastery of nature? Niagara overflows with meaning. The waterfall is the landscape. But the waterfall is also the Bomb. The waterfall is Marilyn, both siren and machine. The waterfall is the light, but at the Cave of the Winds, to see it you pass through darkness. The memory hole feels like a dark cavern, but light that makes us close our eyes is darkness to us. I went into the waterfall and the spray made me blind. I went to the waterfall because I wished, deliberately, to see.

One

WHITE MAN’S FANCY, RED MAN’S FACT

MOST NIAGARA BOOKS BEGIN in the clear light of geology: sunlight glinting off glaciers, water chiseling a gorge. We’ll start in the half-light of myth.

A long time ago, the Indians who lived at Niagara Falls were suffering a devastating plague. People were dying in droves. Hoping to end the carnage, they made sacrifices to the gods. They began with fruits, flowers, the choicest morsels from the harvest. They sent meats and tobacco in canoes over the Falls. Nothing appeased the angry gods. Finally, they decided to sacrifice the most beautiful young maiden in the village. The girl, Lelawala, was packed into a white canoe with a cornucopia of other tasty treats and sent crashing down to her doom. But wait! Instead of hitting the water below, she was caught by the powerful Thunder Beings who live behind the waterfall. There, she learned the cause of the deadly plague that was killing her kinsfolk: a noxious-breathed serpent was poisoning the water. She returned to her village with the news that they must vacate the toxic town. They packed up and left, but the giant snake pursued them, so village warriors—with some help from the Thunder God—killed it. Its body, squirming in its death throes, formed the brink of the Horseshoe Fall.

This legend used to be told by the recorded audio on the Maid of the Mist tour boats as they nosed their way into the spray below the Falls. It appeared in guidebooks, picture books and regional histories. It found its way into movies about the Falls and was depicted on T-shirts, coffee mugs and shot glasses. To this day it’s plastered all over the Web, and postcards showing the Maid are still a staple of Niagara souvenir stands. They usually show a well-formed Indian maiden, often topless, standing up in a canoe as it plunges over the brink. She looks noble and nubile at the same time. In some early versions, the Indian maiden forms a diptych with a naked water sprite writhing in the misty water, apparently meant to personify the Falls. The pair is labeled White man’s fancy; red man’s fact.

By 1996, Native Americans had had enough of white man’s fancy passing for red man’s fact. The region’s Senecas, they pointed out, had never practiced human sacrifice. Nor had any of the Iroquois Confederacy’s six nations, who call themselves the Haudenosaunee, nor any other Native American people known to have lived in western New York. So why would they have included it in their folktales? The story was clearly a fake. And it was not just inauthentic; it was offensive.

We’re portrayed as savages, Bill Grandpa Bear Swanson, executive director of the state American Indian Movement, told the Buffalo News. This has got to stop. Allan Jamieson, director of Nento, a native arts and culture group, called the story racist propaganda, and Richard Hill, an artist and American studies professor, declared it a racial stereotype. A group of Indians announced they would begin picketing the Maid of the Mist tour boats unless the fake legend was dropped.

The Maid of the Mist Corporation objected. To accuse us of racism is outrageous, said Christopher Glynn, a vice president. He explained why the corporation didn’t want to drop the story: We are not real anxious to change what we’ve been doing for a hundred years.

The protesters held their line. If the tour boat operator would not ax the fake myth, they would picket the boat launch in two weeks. Their timing was perfect. It was September, and Regis and Kathie Lee were headed to town, scheduled to shoot their popular morning talk show at the Falls. Faced with the vision of a flood of bad press swamping their boats, the Maid of the Mist Corporation decided to jettison the Maid. James Glynn, company president, was dispatched four days later to announce the corporate change of heart.

We are very sensitive to the concerns of Native American people and want to ensure that we do not portray their heritage in an inappropriate manner, he told reporters. The legend was struck from the recorded audio.

All myths are in some sense fictions, of course, but this one is a fake even as myth. The history of Niagara is a history of elisions, artifice and outright deception, so it seems appropriate that its originary myth would be made-up. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, a mythology reflects its region. And yet, the more I think about the Maid of the Mist, the more I begin to feel that somehow this odd, obnoxious, prurient fake legend gets something about Niagara exactly right. It has much of Niagara’s story in it: the community in crisis, the displaced Indians, the power in the Falls, the poisoned water, even the sacrificial victim for a dying town—these may not be Indian themes, but they are some of the deepest and most continuous Niagara themes. Could there be—despite Indians’ protest to the contrary—a Native American kernel in this spurious tale? At some point, I become convinced that if I can untangle the threads of the fake myth, I’ll have a key that will unlock a storehouse of hidden history.

I should stop here and admit that I have a bit of a problem dropping things. In the course of looking into, say, the history of a museum at Niagara, I will hear from a librarian that the museum’s collection has been bought by a Toronto art dealer. I will start calling and emailing that art dealer until he agrees to let me come and visit his collection, at which point I will drive the nine hours to Toronto and spend two days at his house—to his great surprise—reading all of the letters he’s written and received about the collection. And while I’m there he will show me an electric chair he believes was looted from the Auburn State Prison, though the Auburn Prison electric chair is said to have been destroyed in a 1929 riot, and I will drive nine hours home and the very next day crash my computer downloading newspaper articles off LexisNexis that have accounts of the riots at Auburn Prison with maps that might potentially show the extent of the damage and whether the chair could have been salvaged.

I haven’t yet figured out the truth of the chair, but the New York State Archives has some prison account books I’m planning on taking a look at the next time I happen to be passing through Albany.

In any case, this is what happens with the Maid of the Mist story. I keep digging deeper into the fake myth, and I keep finding further levels of fakery. Which means that I have to keep going. Eventually, I find myself at the American Antiquarian Society, looking into Native American history at Niagara.

The American Antiquarian Society is an institution as adorably uptight as it sounds. Founded by Isaiah Thomas, Revolutionary printer of the Massachusetts Spy, it’s a private library incorporated to encourage the collection and preservation of the antiquities of our country, and of curious and valuable productions in Art and Nature that have a tendency to enlarge the sphere of human knowledge. I love the art and nature bit—in addition to books and papers, the Antiquarian Society used to have a natural history collection: rocks, minerals, shells, butterflies, taxidermied animals. They offloaded it years ago, when it became no longer correct to conflate the works of man with the works of the natural world. This is something that happened at Niagara too, but I’ll get to that later.

A Palladian brick building on a hill in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Antiquarian Society’s collection comprises miles of rare books, diaries, letters, sheet music, postcards, prints and other assorted detritus (they call it ephemera) of everyday life in America from Columbus through 1876. They have handbills, advertisements, school certificates and even a paper-doll collection. Best of all, there’s a bevy of librarians who actually know about all these things and love to tell you about them. When I was there, another reader asked to see some items in the board game collection, and there was much excitement and joy among the librarians upon delivering them up. Not many people, it seems, take the time to appreciate the board games.

On the down side of being a reader at the American Antiquarian Society is their draconian list of rules. Every day upon arrival, you sign in with a frock-coated attendant (I mean it—a frock coat!) and then hand over everything that to my mind makes historical research fun or even possible—cups of coffee, salty snacks, iPods, cell phones, candy, almonds, pens. You put all those things into a locker and go into a high-ceilinged, octagonal rotunda topped with an oculus and ornamented with the usual portraits of sternly disapproving founders. You fill out little slips in duplicate requesting the materials you want to see, which are then brought to you on carts along with white gloves for handling them and foam cushions for the books to lounge on while you read them. You, I might note, are sitting on a very hard chair, and if you squirm around too much, the portraits glare at you harder.

At the American Antiquarian Society, I start reading the earliest print accounts of the Falls, keeping an eye out for serpents and nubile maidens. The oldest print mention of the Falls is by French explorer Samuel de Champlain; he heard about the big waterfall around 1615 but didn’t bother to go see it, though he noted it on his maps. The first European to see and then describe the Falls in print was Louis Hennepin, a Flemish Recollect priest who accompanied the explorer La Salle there in 1678. Hennepin describes the Falls in his 1683 account of that visit, Description de la Louisiane. (The whole New World, or at least their part of it, was Louisiana to the French at that point.) Fourteen years later, Hennepin published a revised and expanded version of his report on the New World, this one called A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America.

Hennepin, like other early travelers, notes that the area is heavily populated by Native Americans, but makes no mention of myths or stories attached to the place. Priests were too focused on Christianizing the Indians to be interested in hearing their heathen tales—in fact, they did very little asking about the native culture. They seem to have walked into Indian villages already in mid-sermon. The poor Indians probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

Hennepin does say that the area is rife with snakes, even though on his first trip he tromps the entire length of the Niagara River without ever seeing a single one. He describes the dry space behind the Falls’ sheet of water, and claims it is where the RattleSnakes retire, by certain Passages which they find underground. Since he didn’t see a single snake or go behind the Falls himself, it’s reasonable to suppose his native guides may have told him this. But the local Indians don’t live at the waterfall. ’Tis reasonable to presume, Hennepin concludes, that the horrid noise of the Fall, and the fear of these poisonous Serpents, might oblige the Savages to seek out a more commodious Habitation.

In Hennepin’s second volume, there’s an interesting note about waterfalls and sacrifice. Some have taken notice, he tells us of Indians, that when they meet with any Cascade or fall of Waters, which is difficult to cross, and apprehend any danger, they throw a Beaver’s Skin, Tobaco, Porcelain, or some such matter into it by way of Sacrifice, to gain the Favour of the Spirit that presides there. It’s a rare attempt on the part of the self-important priest to understand where the locals are coming from, and it doesn’t last long. For the most part, his descriptions of Indians are limited to graphic and probably exaggerated accounts of their supposed barbarity. The Iroquois, for instance, he declares to have exterminated more than Two million of Souls in their extended territory. The New York Public Library has George Bancroft’s personal copy of Hennepin’s book in their Rare Book Room, and the eminent nineteenth-century historian has underlined Two million and made a marginal note: Absurd exaggeration. He isn’t alone in doubting the priest. Among the French, Hennepin garnered a reputation as Un Grand Menteur, a Big Liar.

Not that other writers of the period are much better; few early accounts of exploration give us a real sense of the native inhabitants of the so-called New World. We don’t even really get a very strong sense of who the people living in the region were, let alone their feelings about Niagara. From Champlain, we learn that the inhabitants of the Niagara frontier around 1600 were Indians called Onguiaronon, or People of Thundering Waters (Niagara is a mispronunciation of Onguiara), which suggests they held the Falls in high esteem. Early historians claim the Onguiaronon venerated the Falls enough to bury their most respected chiefs there, but it’s unclear if that’s true. Only a few bodies have been found.

The French called the Onguiaronon the Neutrals, because they remained neutral in the wars between Algonquian Indians of the Great Lakes region and the powerful Iroquois Confederacy of New York. Apparently, this neutrality didn’t help them much; in fact, their role in Niagara history is to give the place its name and then be exterminated. Sometime around 1650, Senecas are said to have killed the last of their men and adopted the remaining women and children, as was customary. No doubt the Onguiaronon, like all northeastern native peoples at this time, had already lost much of their population to European-introduced diseases such as measles, smallpox and influenza. The fact that no separate Onguiaronon identity remained in Seneca culture suggests they may have been closely related to the Senecas in the first place.

When the last of the Onguiaronon became Senecas, they also became members of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, most often translated as People of the Longhouse. This political alliance, the oldest continuously operating form of government on the continent, was centered then, as now, on the council fire at Onondaga, New York. There, the Grand Council of Chiefs meets yearly, as decreed by the Haudenosaunee law of governance, the Great Law of Peace. In the days of the earliest European explorers, the Haudenosaunee comprised Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks, hence the alternate name Five Nations. (In 1720, the Tuscaroras would be added to the alliance, after being driven out of their North Carolina home by colonists, and the confederacy would come to be known as the Six Nations.)

The whole reason the Senecas were placed in this area was to be guardian of the waterways, Darwin John tells me by phone. I’m in Niagara Falls on a brief jailbreak from the American Antiquarian Society, enjoying dangerous vices like eating and talking on the phone. Darwin and I were supposed to meet on Goat Island, because Darwin is in the Falls on business—he is energy planner for the Seneca Nation of Indians. But he lives 90 miles away, on the Cattaraugus Reservation, and when he arrived in Niagara Falls, he realized he had forgotten my cell phone number, so he simply took the walk around Goat Island himself. He seems perfectly cheerful about it when I call him later, back in Cattaraugus. The Seneca Nation has recently been involved in relicensing talks for the Niagara Power Project (about which more later) and Darwin wants me to understand the Senecas’ longstanding connection to the region.

If you look on our emblem, it says Keeper of the Western Door, he explains. That, within the Six Nations, is a very important role, because the Western Door was back then the transportation route for other tribes to come into the area, and for us to move out of the area. Senecas were known throughout the Midwest, the South and the East for trading with other tribes out west. Niagara was the doorway to our area and our exploration going as far west as the Mississippi delta and points in between.

The Western Door, he explains, does not just mean the Niagara River. There are actually a couple of doors, he says, the seaway trail coming from points west on Lake Erie and into the Niagara region. It was a transportation route. Ellicott Creek, Tonawanda Creek: all of these were areas the Senecas had lived in since time immemorial. All these waterways and trails and transportation routes were well used and well known and that’s why we protected them. They were an important gift given to the people by the Creator.

I ask Darwin John about Seneca stories associated with the region, and he tells me a version of the serpent story that doesn’t involve maids or sacrifice.

According to our creation story, he says, "Thunder Beings were trying to remove a serpent that had been terrorizing the area, and during the struggle they

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